Where are the world’s roots? Are they within myself, does the world appear only when I
look at it, and do I determine how it appears? Or is the world already there and I am
determined by it? Michael Kenna’s answer is unambiguous: The world is there already,
and he tries to see it in his camera’s viewfinder.
Michael Kenna photographs landscapes, they are his passion, but perhaps his real
passion are actually allegories, the search for things in which a word, a feeling, indeed
human existence is condensed. In nature, trees seem like the main bearers of
symbolism, but also mountains, clouds, the mysterious surface of water and the traces
that humans leave there.
Nature determines what the photographer sees, not the other way round. Michael
Kenna’s love for Japan has produced numerous photographs reminiscent of that
country, and most recently he published the wonderful book Forms of Japan (2015).
In 2015 and 2016, he travelled to the Abruzzi, where he encountered a wild, archaic
landscape charged with emotion – and his photographs reflect that. They show
nature’s harsh as well as its tender sides, and we see how ably man once used to
accommodate himself into nature. The settlements, built to be protected by the
mountain, seem as if they were part of it.
Michael Kenna found something else in Italy which doesn’t exist in quite this way
anywhere else: many small Catholic churches, and in them a great variety of
confessionals (confessionali). Patiently, he collected them over the course of several
years. The series Confessionali comprises more than 70 of them, all from the region
Emilia Romagna. Each of them has its own character, and they seem like living
creatures, not just in the eyes of believers, but also to uninvolved observers. One
wears the cross quite sternly, the next one a crown. One looks as if it wanted to start
dancing, the other one appears rather sedate. One looks rather elegant in its spot,
others look a bit lost and forlorn. Have confessionals ever before been looked at in
this way? Furnished with all the human, all too human characteristics, as mirrors of all
of us?
Galerie Albrecht is pleased to be able to show photographs of the Abruzzi and the
Confessionali – as one of the first galleries worldwide. Signed copies of the book
“Abruzzo”, just published by Nazraeli Press and “Confessionali”, published by corsiero
editore, are available at Galerie Albrecht.

Between 1799 and 1804 a young naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), visited the American continent for the first time, making two expeditions. The most adventurous section of his journey was the trip down the Orinoco to the Rio Negro in Venezuela. At the time, his report on this journey laid the foundations for a holistic way of looking at nature – one that was way ahead of its time. Von Humboldt was the first researcher to point out how the forces of nature, both animate and inanimate, work together. In 1853, these first chronicles of the New World were published in a special edition entitled “Jaguars and electric eels”, an excerpt from the “Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctical Regions of the New Continent”.

The largely media-based works in the collection of the same name on show at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Berlin describe a reality that no longer distinguishes between naturalness and artificiality but sees things as a whole and as equals. Starting with the idea of the kind of ecology that focuses not only on natural circumstances but also on the economic and socio-political situation, as well as on technological progress, the exhibition investigates an alternative interpretation of anthropology and zoology.

Accordingly, the selection of works evidences the search for our evolutionary roots, looking into questions of indigeneity, of hybrids and synthetic forms of life, the migration of the species, and that of our constantly changing perceptions of reality due to all kinds of different influences.

As the various artists’ contributions to the exhibition illustrate, our modern life science questions both the line between naturalness and artificiality and the ontology of objects of all kinds. The different complexes of subjects move within that intermediate space between nature and art, their various systems offering new approaches to interpretation and methods of classification.

As one of the youngest members of the “Star Group”, Zhao Gang participated in some of post-1949 China's earliest modern art exhibitions before pursuing his own career in New York.
His paintings explore the themes of the legacy of imperial systems, politics and heritage, between both the Asian world and the Western world. Being an artist of bilateral heritage, Zhao Gang reflects on canonized Western positions from a transcultural perspective. His latest museum exhibitions include “The Road to Serfdom II”, 2016 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Sanitago de Chile, “Paramour's Garden”, 2015 at the Suzhou Museum, Suzhou, “The Road to Serfdom”, 2015, at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

In showing this exhibition of earlier works by Zhao Gang in our Berlin Kabinett parallel to our Kippenberger show at the gallery, we would like to suggest a certain connection.
Both painters are often described as exceptionally prolific and bitingly sarcastic. In retrospective, Kippenberger's productivity can be seen as a “critical affirmation” of late capitalism, while Zhao Gang's work could be read as a “critical affirmation” of late communism, namely, as once described by philosopher and sinologist Francois Jullien: “capitalist bulimia flanked by the communist party”.